o pen : December 16

Last year, in December, I had shared Jane Hirschfield’s "A Hand Is Shaped For What It Holds or Makes” which ends with these lines:
"A life is shaped by what it holds or makes.
I make these words for what they can't replace.”

http://beautywelove.blogspot.com/2011/09/hand-is-shaped-for-what-it-holds-or.html
As this will be the last session of “O Pen” for 2013, I thank you all, grateful for your revelations and responses to “hold” after sharing.
As the Dalai Lama said of Nelson Mandela this week, “The best tribute we can pay to him is to do whatever we can to contribute to honoring the oneness of humanity and working for peace and reconciliation as he did.” Sharing poetry is one place to start.

Poems:


Dream by Eileen Myles
The Cloud – Percy Bysshe Shelley
(Published with "Prometheus Unbound", 1820.]
Mentioned in The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng)
Christmas Trees by Robert Frost
Taking Down the Christmas Tree by Jane Kenyon

So what do you think of when you hear the word "dream"? Sentimental "follow your dreams", sweet dreams,
midsummer night's dreams and folly, deep and troubling sleep, Martin Luther King-like dreams?

The physical nature of dreams is chaotic, with thoughts creating scenes that jump, are interrupted... whereas the idealization of dreams seeks a unified fulfillment... What works for me in Eileen Myles, is the repeated words, that create "recognition links" -- so "small signs" travel through a stanza break to:
I saw a brown
sign with wisdom
on it
I saw a brown
one leaning
with wisdom
on it

sign/brown/wisdom...
one leaning

and then, leaping through yet another stanza break
to a fringe of a mirror/leaning
first, over a pond,
then leaning against...
the moulding
cardboard or

wood which materials do you
BREAK
does your wisdom prefer

which a- BREAK*
partment

At this point, some emotional truth seems to emerge -- something universal enough for a reader to care.
I felt brave to
have touched
her love the screen

never mind the door, dogs and cats coming in and out,
now the sign is TWO signs and there is fear
and three forms of fading... and another emotional truth:
"because I do not want
you to have died in vain"

The question arose why people struggled so with this poem, but have enjoyed other "dream" poems.
Certainly people had a lot to say about it!

Reading the Shelley, but with the context of a prisoner in a Japanese war camp in Malaysia hanging on to it, heightened the appreciation of "Cloud" and poetry. The internal rhymes, slant rhymes, alliterations give something solid to recognize in spite of shifting shapes "between earth and heaven".
The last stanza, particularly the last lines, make the reader feel the power of the cloud-- the true possibility, one might say faith, of hope

"Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,
I arise and unbuild it again."


The Robert Frost Christmas letter provided us a wonderful stage of a New England farm where a crusty farmer considers the offer of a slick city man regarding trees suitable for Christmas. The art of common speech,
blended with beautiful images, personifications, allow both a meditation on human nature, but also the relationship of humans to trees. There is plenty of craft to admire in such a long narrative poem,
but more evident in Jane Kenyon's "Taking Down the Christmas Tree. "Olfactory" light, and the very tactile sound of "tick, tick, the desiccated needles drop".
There is a wrenching sadness, with the moon shining with only "half a heart"... a destruction (pulling limbs)
which makes the ten year old feel "depraved". Comments included how we murder the trees to help us be merry.
The idea of the "kosher kill" where we give thanks to those we kill.
It is easy to read dessicrated...vs. desiccated...

The tone is not uniform, but ends with a surprising
"If it's darkness
we're having, let it be extravagant."
Perhaps the dark foreshadows Kenyon's Leukemia...
but even then, I find hopeful to linger on the final word, "extravagant"--
a full acceptance of the moment, of taking down, rather like "full catastrophe living".

Poems for Lunch: December 12

From a Drumlin, November, Late Afternoon –Mike Yaworski
What the Heart Cannot Forget by Joyce Sutphen
First Snowfall in St. Paul by Katrina Vandenberg
I Looked Up by Mary Oliver
As Kingfishers Catch Fire by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Sonnet 73 by William Shakespeare
+ Untitled (Abraham Lincoln)

If you are already subscribed to Garrison Keilor’s Writers Almanac, forgive the repeats in poems 2-4— but even so, sharing and responding in a group, in person, elicits a different response to a poem perhaps already heard on the radio, or read in a daily email. Mike generously agreed to share the first one.
Hearing a poem, read by the author, can be a wonderful bonus, when rhythms and cadences match the poet's intent, and indeed, Mike's poem, filled to the brim with alliteration and parallel structures is no exception.
It evokes the landscape of Auburn where he grew up, which, even in the dormancy of November, offers a sense, indeed a real FEELING of endless beginnings, possibilities.

The topic of "sentimentality" came up with Joyce Sutphen's poem, along with a discussion of both title and final stanza. What is remembrance when coupled with the "heart"? Sutphen starts with a large generalization,
"Everything remembers something" that evokes the beginning of the Earth. Each tercet then proceeds to exemplify the idea of memory, cloud, turtle, tree, and finally the human casing of skin, frame of bones,
acts of the feet (dance) and arms (lifting up a child). Is the last stanza necessary after arriving at
this sense of connection? She repeats the title repeated, reversing the subject/object: the Heart remembering Everything, and embraces everything again, as something both lost and found and personalized
with a double meaning of "the heart cannot forget" by itself, but attached to the idea that if we love,
we then have a basis for what it is we will remember.

We discussed the process of poetry -- how often we can edit or revise our original idea, but lose something with such refinement. By taking away the last stanza, perhaps the sense of having the point nailed in so we don't miss it, might not be there, but the reader might not think about the "how" of remembrance the same way.

The next poem needs to be seen as well as heard, as if read "according to the syntax of things" the flow would not capture the feel of beginning drivers braking and skidding in the first snow. The delight of seeing
the poem scratch out the effect of the jerking whine of wheels as the girls learn to take the driver's seat.

Mary Oliver's poem repeats the first three syllables of the title to complete a sentence which leaves us in mystery: what is "it" in "there it was"? We thought of owls, the silence that ruffles as they use their enormous wings. The use of metals for color evokes a phoenix rising, an otherworldliness one feels as the sun sets, catches the "opulent" wings "wreathed in fire". We discussed the role of the judgmental reference to fear of death, limitation of faith which seems to come out of the blue. Such "misery" and "wretchedness" exclude possibilities. "Looking up" thus expands beyond physical observation to mood, with a spiritual connection.

Although I had originally chosen the Hopkins as a natural segue to Mary Oliver's poem, Elaine was quick to point out the connection with Joyce Sutphen's poem -- starting with the physical details and leading to the trinity. Taashire picked up on God creating Man in his likeness, which led to a discussion of the paradox of
God being thoroughly, yet invisibly present. What keeps us going is the faith in practicing what is filled with justice and grace.

We ran out of time to discuss Sonnet 73. Another sensual poem that starts with a visual observation of autumn leaf, the implied sound of their shaking and echo of birds in the branches (in undiminished choir lofts!) and both end of day and life. (sleep, as death's brother). The second sentence brings in the poet's desires... and how "self-substantial fuel" in Sonnet I returns in the self-nourished, self-consuming fire of 73. The third sentence represents, according to Helen Vendler, a change of mind, thus 73 is an example of the "sonnet of self-correction". She goes on to summarize: "Once it is admitted that youth wanes, it is clear that the only locus of true life is the present..." The couplet tie "leave" as noun in line 2 and verb in line 14
re-enacts the loss of love.

poems for Dec 9

Poems for December 9
No Option by Byron Hoot
Applesauce by Ted Kooser (W.A. 12/3)
Days -- -- Billy Collins
Cave — by Mark Levine
The Dead – William Helen
Untitled by Ryan Van Winkle

I had a chuckle looking at the last names of the authors of the first and last poems-- but what is in a name is quickly dispelled by a title, or clever refusal of one. "No Option" starts with a limited choice of breads, which if used to teach ESOL might well be confusing. Why are choices limited to White or Wheat? The discussion brought up all the "might have beens" locked into childhood and how the poem elicits both things and people that may have been lost, as well as how our experiences are "ingrained".
Kooser's poem about apples also allows access to memory, and then develops both an inside/outside, kitchen apron with sailboats to sailing the world that brings a sense of "fractal" lines tracing a person in more than one scene. Perhaps my favorite part is the delightful anthropomorphism
"as if all
the apples were talking at once,
as if they'd come cold and sour from chores in the orchard,
and were trying to shoulder in close to the fire.

Mark Levine's "Cave" provided many levels, perhaps an association with Plato's cave, and how memory shadows what we want to remember and truth... Is the boy the younger version of the speaker of the poem, the "echo" the equivalent of walking into a telescope backwards, equally distorted?
The diction of the second stanza mimics a difficult passage, to some metaphorical woods
We wended through a half-formed unintelligible
brushy wood to a place I knew called "cave"

and the final sentence has an contorted syntax equally enigmatic:

I wanted one, back then, when I had something to offer,
when I wasn't in this place, where light passes through me,
when I wasn't like this,
which is what,
when I wanted one,
as he, poor boy, wanted me.

I wanted what? a boyhood? a chance at something missed by wanting to be so grown up.

If not a sense of failure, certainly a sense of great sadness, emptiness.
*
The Dead gave rise as well to much discussion: Indisputable details of the Holocaust followed by clouds, reassurance of memory -- THERE you are... but also perhaps a sense of desperation in the "HERE I am", unable to join those who have passed on. He sees them "for the rest of his life,
doing all they possibly could—
forming, obeying the wind."
The ending reminds us we do not have control.


Billy Collins gentle irony was a good antidote, and we ended with the "Untitled" which is a style the poet has adopted where the epigram will create a portrait -- and the words in the epigram will appear in the poem
-- calling it "untitled" leaves a sense of anonymity, and yet, there is a vastness in remembering living connection where time is not in short supply.

As ever, these short notes do not do justice to a rich discussion -- pondering the ways words can pull
associations and details of our lives, experiences, and shared with others.

poems for lunch -- Dec. 5

Folklore – Dean Young
Symposium – Paul Muldoon
Betty Friedan’s Final Advice – Stephen Dunn
Tanager – Billy Collins
Concerning Essential Existence by Mary Ruefle
Untitled (Marie Howe) by Ryan Van Winkle
Untitled (Abraham Lincoln) by Ryan Van Winkle (tbd Dec. 12)



What truth is handed down through tales, proverbs, or even cliches?
Dean Young makes a provocative collage of "almost" sayings -- that follow the rhythm
and syntax of something familiar, but yet provide an eerie sense of something not being
quite right. "Feeding stray shadows/ only attracts more shadows."
Starve a fever,/ shatter a glass house".
There is an affable tone in sentences like "People often mistake/thirst for hunger so first take a big glug"followed by an anti-war "almost slogan" and a personal comment "I don't want you to be wasted on me" with a totally out-of-context "even though/all summer the pool was, I didn't/get in it once.
And then the game is rolling with repeat of wasted... more proverbs, details of hospitals, TVs, Civil War, until "Your turning point/may be lying crying on the floor."

What is folklore, but shared lessons to help all humanity... but leaving us, after a wild romp, still with the problem of coping with whatever comes down the road.


The next poem, called Symposium, shares a similar technique of borrowing from proverbs. Why Symposium?
Yes, it basically was a Greek drinking party, and perhaps this could be a fun party game. Wiki describes it as a "key Hellenic social institution. It was a forum for men of good family to debate, plot, boast, or simply to revel with others. They were frequently held to celebrate the introduction of young men into aristocratic society. Symposia were also held by aristocrats to celebrate other special occasions, such as victories in athletic and poetic contests."
No only a title with a long history behind it, but the form is a rhymed sonnet. The last two sentences,
conclude like he who has "shot his bolt" ( to have already achieved all that you have the power, ability, or strength to do and to be unable to do more). Instead of "where there is smoke, there is fire"
"there's no smoke after the horse is gone." I love how clever Muldoon says so much nonsense which we can understand without needing paraphrase.


In reading Stephen Dunn's poem, I was glad to hear elucidation about both Betty Friedan, but also a reference
to how to deal with "unintelligible". Why three stanzas? Does "serious fun" deserve a breath after one stanza before plunging into "After the ceremony" -- have you forgotten dear reader, the slant reference to the ship's captain not to marry? But which ceremony, for whom, and why the advice in the next two stanzas.
The tone seems playful, a gentle irony which may or may not include the Shakespearian reference to "heaven" as "vagina". Jim was reminded of Joseph Campbell's "Skeleton Key to Finnegan's Wake" (known as the greatest book that nobody's read). Apparently Campbell's critique provided material for his later, Hero with 1,000 faces).

A different sort of irony is presented in Billy Collin's Tanager, balancing realities. He reminds us of how conditional perception really is.

Mary Ruefle uses parallel syntax to drive her point home -- perhaps her horse joining Muldoon's.

The Van Winkle poem merits more discussion -- but we enjoyed the wave form, the sense of tide coming in and out, sounds, rhythms, and sense of loss of language... "all I ever got from the sea" sounds like a metaphor... and the final newspaper "say" should wake up radar...

O Pen : December 2

November for Beginners by Rita Dove
Remembrance Day by Evelyn Lau
Advent by Mary Jo Salter
After Pisarro – by Byron Beynon
if the night is long, remember your unimportance by Grace Marie Grafton
Teacher W.S. Merwin


In today's discussion we focussed on titles: What does "Beginner" evoke, or "Remembrance" or "Advent"?
Something about beginnings, brings a sense of hope, as we remember the past and move forward. What is new,
for architecture? I think of the currently oldest standing bridge in Paris called "Le Pont Neuf". Certainly the poem "After Pisarro" could mean the traditional, "In the style of", but how does the perfectly aligned
right margin correspond to that? This 17 line poem brushstrokes a present moment long past, with the
long, final fragment, "His early canvas/for a new, tragic century, created from observation through "rented" panes. (I apologize for bad typos: 5th line: strength; of course 15th line, umbrellas; no period, line 16 after day; of course only one s on observed.
The two poems by Grafton and Merwin are similar: one created "after a line", although with a completely different tone, reflecting quite different times. Merwin's poem, from the Miner's Pale Children, was created in 1970, addressing what seems to be quite real pain, played like a record at the close of a year.
The parallel construction:

What I live for I can seldom believe in
Who I love I cannot go to
What I hope is always divided

supports an image of acute emotional pain, followed by "but" which changes perspectives, that do not rely on justifying, or sure promises, and "yet" this too is part of learning.
Grafton's poem, taking the line "if the night is long remember your unimportance" adopts a flippant tone,
with delightful details of play-acting including "no one wants to be the bramble. "Oh me."
The speaker of the poem goes on to ruminate on the role of the wraith, whose only strength is time
to ruminate on self-improvement courses. Cheeky, fun, but self-absorbed without letting the reader in.


But to return to the opening poem, the enjambed lines, the braiding of mood with a hint of King Lear,
We sit down
in the smell of the past
and rise in a light
that is already leaving.
We ache in secret,
memorizing

What is it that aches in us, that we keep in secret, what is it we memorize before leaping into a stanza
beginning with a gloomy line, yet which ends with Zithers? The titles is intriguing -- as we review the year, start with November -- the softness of snow... and end with promising to play the fool in Spring. It is not a primer, but more "where to start", November, which doesn't necessarily have the "easy way out" with snow-- but rather is a pre-advent advent season, to prepare us for celebration, born in Spring.

Remembrance day probes beyond "armistice" day. What is time when shopping on a dismal November 11th is interrupted by 60 seconds of remembrance? The poet doesn't make a break from that experience to recounting her friend's memory of the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, including horrifying details of a street urchin's head in a bucket, the rest of him used for food. Bunkers provide relief -- and you realize, the speaker of the poem is still in the store, the 60 seconds of remembrance over, and back to the poem goes on to search for the perfect dress, and the store a relief from remembering.


Mary Jo Salter's poem, "Advent", in 20 tercets combines weather, building a gingerbread house five days before Christmas, and the Advent calendar with windows so carefully coaxed open to reveal the old masters who painted the Christmas story. All this while the gingerbread house receives shingled peppermints, and the shutter, snapped off, retrieved... with a mysterious last stanza "a page torn from a book/still blank for the two of us,/a mother and her child." Comments included making Mary real... the sense of vulnerability, with the future waiting to be written.

O Pen November 25

Morning Prayer – Kazim Ali
Chorus by Catherine Barnett
Variations on a Theme by W.S. Merwin
I Am Vocal and the Salt -- by Alice Notley
Epilogue by Robert Lowell

In the APR (Sept/Oct. 2013) Kazim Ali has five poems followed by an interview with Christopher Hennessy.
He stresses that poetry traffics in the unsayable, not communication. Ali speaks of Emily Dickinson as a "totem poet" (for her penchant for mixing dictions, her breathtaking fearlessness and focus on the soul."
He further stresses that he works in breath "which is to say a sentence that moved through a poem, held by an idea." Language is material we use to create experience, and create a sense of self which is only perception.

For Ali, his love of syllables and vowels "could tolerate words and consonants because they came along with the package", but he works in breath, "how a sentence moves through the poem, held by an idea."
In Morning Prayer, four couplets, held at the waist by the single line "season to season" divide a setting of resonance from two questions. The first, about what it is in us that reaches to know what's after...
the second, an almost meditation on spirit -- is the function to give light, or to hold it.

The discussion of the poem included the feeling of sound as resonance, the idea that a potter can hear when the form of the pot is right from the sound, the image of the Grail, the idea of an autistic child (created by Elizabeth Moon, author) who states, "if light has speed, dark must too."
I enjoyed this poem more than the ones in the APR, partly because the words couched in so much white space,
allow the connection of thought and word, in a changing vibration that does not stay dark or light, contain or give.

The second poem brought to mind the function of the Greek Chorus, to comment on the action. The metaphor of the "elephant in the room" extended to the elephant squeezed into a church is both delightful and effective. I love the anthropomorphizing, the abstract "curtain of light" and metonym in a dirty gown of wrinkles,the whole galaxy shivering! The opening provided by elephant, opens the room up to the larger idea of church, not as building but gathering of spirits in a grand "all of it".

Merwin's poem brought up the musical idea of "fortspinung" -- a musical motif-- a spinning out of thanks,
with an opening, amplification and conclusion. Because of Merwin's style where each line suspends, able to
resonate both with what comes before and after, the theme of "blind gratitude" becomes a thread to life itself and the unknown that guides us. (The blind seer, and idea of the Dog Star, Sirius)

These lines
homesickness that guides the plovers
from somewhere they had loved before
they knew they loved it to somewhere
they had loved before they saw it

remind me of Ali's question of what it is "in us" that reaches to know... in this case not what is "after" -- but "before" -- unknowns that have no beginning or end -- and the opportunity to see, visit, revisit them.


The Notley poem addresses so much in the words, "Salt" both by itself (Lot, salt of the Earth) -- and coupled with "voice" and use of first person gave rise to a lengthy discussion. Above the salt, below the Salt and Aethel as lords, and athel as salt cedar that sucks up salt...
Martin understood a psychotic divided into several personalities and voices... but the question remains -- why ARE we here? Which elephants are in the room? How do we reconcile our complexity. Certainly a poem to revisit.

The final poem, rather like a epilogue to the poems gathered picks up Notley's concerns,
"All's misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?"

John provided the Vermeer painting reference with the map. I was reminded of this quote about photography by Susan Sontag:
"As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure."
-- from Susan Sontag, On Photography

The coupling of 4 adjectives, lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
for the snapshot intrigues me. Why LURID, which implies anything but "threadbare" (bright, brilliant, vivid, glaring, shocking, fluorescent, flaming, dazzling, intense;)
Knowing that this is the last poem of Lowell's last book is paradoxically reassuring. The first line which scans so nicely, "Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme"
no matter which tone attached to it (paying homage, shaking fists at form, at writing itself) remain insufficient to create something unique... Is the question "why are they no help to me now" perhaps recognition that something in the speaker has changed, as if understanding whatever "help" they had provided is also insufficient for the stage he is in. How do we give "living name" to each figure captured?

I love questions that prod us to open up our experience...